MODx Updates for Both Evolution and Revolution

In the wake of the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report's listing MODx (news, site) as one of the open source content management systems gathering strength, the folks at MODx are keeping the momentum going -- here are two fresh releases singing that tune.

MODx Needs Testers for New Evolution

MODx CMS Evolution 1.0.1 RC1 is available, and they're hoping to release the final version soon. To this end, the MODx team has put out a call for testers. In particular, they're asking for people to look for bugs in the Manager or incompatibilities with Add-ons. If your native language is not English, they're asking you to check the localizations as well.

MODx Offers Revolution Beta

The first is a traditionally-packaged beta with all of the files pre-extracted, use this version if you don't have root or sudo access to your machine. The other is an advanced version with a smaller download and compressed install.

The team says that hopefully this is the last beta for MODx Revolution 2.0. They expect commits from this point into RC1 to focus on bug fixes (especially around security), IE issues, and the install process.

Improvements coming with Revolution 2.0 include:

Many bugfixes

Cleanup of the Security section, with more consolidation and a simpler UI

Installer speed improvements

Form Customization letting you show/hide and retitle fields within the manager

Conversion of the left-navbar in the manager to a tabbed interface

Extra options for TV editing fields

Included is a note to OS X users: "when replacing your current Revolution install folder with beta-4, if doing so locally, make sure to copy core/config/config.inc.php somewhere, as Mac OSX when overwriting folders does not recursively check and may delete the file."

Why 2 Versions of MODx?

In the beginning, there was only MODx. But after 4+ years of developing and learning, the MODx team realized that they'd learned so much that they could rebuild it better, faster and stronger than before. The original code base was given the name Evolution, and continues to receive incremental improvements that ensure backward compatibility.

MODx Revolution is a ground-up rewrite of MODx. What that means is it's almost an entirely new content management system.Here's what we mean:

A Whole New Core: Completely new and as we said, built from the ground-up. This version uses xPDO, the database modeling framework.

Configuration is Wide Open: This CMS seems made for configuration of every element possible from menus to install location to installation of multiple sites on a single core.

New Transport Packages: Installation and distribution is easy and customizable

MODx Manager: The new Manager is built using the MODx API, ExtJS, and Smarty templates, demonstrating how flexible the new core and API really are.

New user system: Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) security model is new, but you can still use the old system for previous installations, so you should be able to move to the new system without any issues.

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